Superbugs Resistant to Antibiotics and Other Fascinating News on the Web

The Inside Job

The introduction of antibiotics dealt a serious blow to the bacteria that attacks our bodies. But it wasn’t a deadly one. And different forms of bacteria have spent the last few decades evolving. Some of these “superbugs” are now totally resistant to antibiotics, and they are basically teaching other bacteria how to resist them as well. Here’s a great overview of the problem from Fresh Air’s Terry Gross and journalist David Hoffman: Antibiotics Can’t Keep Up With Nightmare Superbugs. “In the period before World War II … people that got infections, they had to cut it out. They had to cut off limbs, cut off toes, because there weren’t antibiotics. And oftentimes, when people talk about the fact that we might have to go back to a pre-antibiotic age, that’s what they mean — that a simple scrape on the playground could be fatal.”

+ And here’s a Frontline special (available for viewing online): Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria. The contents of this documentary were summed up well by my friend Mera, who follows health trends as closely as anyone I know: “Now there’s a strain or two that have arrived in the States that can teach our local pansy-assed bacteria how to become antibiotic resistant. It’s enough to make me want to wrap the family in saran.”

The Joy(less) Stick

According to his statistical scorecard, Brandon Bryant had logged about 6,000 hours of flight time, flown hundreds of missions, and had killed a total of 1,626 enemies. And he did all that without ever leaving Nevada. From GQ: Confessions of a Drone Warrior.

Go Pump Yourself

Listening to music can lead to a more productive workout. But if you’re looking to get pumped up, there’s something even more effective than listening to music. Making it.

Pulling Strings

“But while we were having fun, we happily and willingly helped to create the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, a web whose strings give governments and businesses countless threads to pull, which makes us…puppets.” From The NY Review of Books: Are We Puppets in a Wired World? Browser tracking software has definitely turned each of us into the Cookie Monster.

Textual Healing

Shaking the World

No first game of any World Series will ever be as memorable as the one in 1989 (I hope). From Grantland, here’s an excellent oral history of the 1989 World Series, which was dominated by the Oakland A’s — and devastated by the Loma Prieta earthquake. “My brother was in the upper deck. He’d gotten up to get a hot dog. When he came back, part of the roof had fallen in his seat.”